Unsafe, insecure: Barriers to safe housing for Black and minoritised migrant women

At the end of October 2024, Hibiscus published a report highlighting the profound housing challenges faced by Black and minoritised migrant women in the UK. The research reveals a correlation between inadequate access to safe, secure housing and an increased likelihood of experiencing mental health struggles.

Hibiscus is a national charity, which has been delivering services for over 30 years to Black and minoritised migrant women (in other words women without British citizenship) in contact with the criminal justice and/or immigration systems. The charity works through a wraparound, trauma-informed, women-centred and rights-based support model, centring anti-racist practice, including through group activities at our specialist women’s centre in North London.

Many of our service users have multiple and complex needs due to past trauma including human trafficking, domestic servitude, domestic abuse and other forms of violence against women and girls (VAWG). Often the recovery of these women is hindered, and can also be re-traumatised by contact with the immigration and criminal justice systems and associated problems including homelessness, poverty and debt, exposure to further harm, communication and cultural barriers, racism and discriminatory treatment.

Over half of the women Hibiscus supported in the last year reported housing insecurity, with those affected nearly twice as likely to suffer from mental health issues. Many of the women live in unsafe or unsuitable accommodation.

“Mona” (not her real name)

“Not having somewhere safe [to live] is slowing my recovery – if you’re constantly experiencing new trauma how can you deal with it as new ones keep coming up?”

Drawing on focus groups with Hibiscus’ frontline practitioners and service users, and data from the charity’s casework, this new evidence report identifies five barriers to safe housing for the women Hibiscus supports, while an accompanying policy briefing makes recommendations for reform. This includes ending the “hostile environment” policy and associated barriers which restrict migrant women’s rights and cause harm to them and their children.

Hibiscus is also calling for an end to reliance on poor quality, shared accommodation for migrants, which causes harm to health and re-traumatisation, and investment in decent, self-contained, family-friendly social housing in communities that is accessible to migrant women. It was of paramount importance to the women taking part in the research that their accommodation should be clean and in good repair, not damp, and not overcrowded. It was also important for it to be within reasonable reach of essential services including children’s schools, and in a location where the women were – and felt they were – safe.

We have also called for the adoption of a gender informed, trauma-responsive and intersectional approach to migrant women’s accommodation provision and the housing application process. Women only accommodation is key. Our research findings echo the 'Strategy for Ending Women’s Homelessness' in London, which made clear that tackling women’s homelessness requires increased availability of safe, suitable and specialist single-sex accommodation and wraparound, multi-agency, trauma-informed support, as well as second-stage and move-on accommodation and support. Critically, this must also be available to women with 'No Recourse to Public Funds' and complex immigration status.

It was important to the women we spoke to that staff onsite at their accommodation, such as security staff, should be trained to take a gender-informed, trauma informed, intersectional approach to their work.  

Hibiscus recommends that training and guidance for staff should be co-designed and co-delivered with women with lived experience and specialist organisations, to ensure accommodation provision respects the rights and meets the needs of migrant women and their children.

Hibiscus would like to hear from any landlords who are interested in helping to identify practice-based solutions to increase successful referrals of Black, minoritised and migrant women and their children into safe and suitable accommodation. To find out more and share your insights, contact info@hibiscus.org.uk.